Preview — War and Revolution
by Domenico Losurdo

War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century

War and Revolution is an original rereading of contemporary history, linking trends of historical revisionism in historiography to an investigation of fundamental philosophical and political categories, such as international civil war, revolution, totalitarianism and genocide. Losurdo begins from the revisionist theses of Ernst Nolte on the Holocaust and of François FuretWar and Revolution is an original rereading of contemporary history, linking trends of historical revisionism in historiography to an investigation of fundamental philosophical and political categories, such as international civil war, revolution, totalitarianism and genocide. Losurdo begins from the revisionist theses of Ernst Nolte on the Holocaust and of François Furet on the French Revolution, and ends with the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson. Losurdo captivates the reader with a history of modern revolt that is a tour de force, giving a new perspective on comparisons between the English, American, French and twentieth-century revolutions....more

Community Reviews

“If we do not appreciate its compound of horror and emancipation, we are ill placed to understand anything of the twentieth century,...” [p306]

This amazing book starts out at full speed and never slows down. It continues an argument already introduced in "Liberalism - A Counter History", by the same author, and anticipates no doubt its continuation in a further volume. The material is copious and that has a logic to it. Those who appeal for brevity and a simple, clear argument, must be reminded“If we do not appreciate its compound of horror and emancipation, we are ill placed to understand anything of the twentieth century,...” [p306]

This amazing book starts out at full speed and never slows down. It continues an argument already introduced in "Liberalism - A Counter History", by the same author, and anticipates no doubt its continuation in a further volume. The material is copious and that has a logic to it. Those who appeal for brevity and a simple, clear argument, must be reminded that in a debate about ideology, one's opponent will not allow any point to pass without challenge and it is not hard to employ rhetorical tricks to swat aside almost any claim, however well stated. This is an argument against ideology and as such it requires and deploys overwhelming evidence. By summarising some key points here, I will unfortunately risk presenting weak arguments that fail to do justice to their source. The mountain of detail really is essential to overcome the barrier of misinformation which it confronts.

The Neo-Liberal theme against which Losurdo argues here is that gradual, incremental social change is preferable to revolutionary change, because in the chaos which revolution unleashes there is an inevitable resort to terror. In other words, radical criticisms from the Left of the current state of affairs are ill advised and harmful. Burke and his many successors argue that terror is the inevitable result of people becoming enthralled by ideological fantasies about an ideal world, because concrete individual freedoms can be sacrificed to an abstract common good. The claim is that while the French and Russian Revolutions were marked by terror and totalitarianism, the English and American Revolutions were relatively peaceful transitions leading to the liberal, market economies of our most advanced nations. Fascism and Nazism are presented as variations on the same ideological thinking as communism, each relying on totalitarian government to maintain their grip. Both in traditional Liberalism and its modern incarnation, appeal is made to Western civilization as the highest achievement of mankind and colonialism or neocolonialism as the ultimately benign means by which the less favoured remainder of humanity is nurtured and educated to share the benefits of modernity.

These Liberal claims rely on an absurd misrepresentation of the historical record and Losurdo devotes much of this book to a review of the evidence. Consequently, the text can at times take on the appearance of a competition to demonstrate how extreme and extensive the violence and bestiality has been in different situations. His point is that claims must be based on evidence and comparisons must be meaningful and fair. Hence it is not legitimate to discuss the “peaceful” English Revolution of 1688 without acknowledging the English Civil War of 1642-1651, William of Orange’s incredibly violent campaigns in Ireland, the treatment of Jacobin rebels in Scotland, and the general mistreatment of Catholics and also Protestant Dissenters. Similarly, it is a mistake to describe the French Revolution as an isolated event, rather than the start of a process culminating in the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Social change does not happen overnight and it is foolish to try to compare social change in different countries and different conditions and even different centuries, by selecting untypical moments out of a longer process and ignoring their context.

So when Liberals refer to The West, they are not pointing to a reality but to an ideal, and it is nonsensical to contrast the ideal of freedom aspired to in Liberal ideology with the practical reality of, let us say, Stalin’s USSR. It would be no less idiotic to compare the ideal of Marx’s utopian vision of communism to the hunger and poverty of the Great Depression or of the Weimar Republic. Nor is it ever transparent where the boundaries of The West are to be located in order to include only its bright side and exclude, for example, Fascism in Spain. Italy and Germany, or starvation in Ireland, or mass slavery in the USA and the genocide of native Americans, or the Western response to the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion in China, or the virtual depopulation of the Congo.

Losurdo rages that the USA was built on the genocide of the native Americans in order to seize full control of land and resources and the transportation of millions of more pliable black slaves from Africa. He points out that the abolition of slavery in the USA was followed by the emergence of white supremacy, expressed in apartheid legislation and widespread lynching. He notes that some 18 states still had laws to criminalise mixed race marriage (miscegenation) as recently as 1967. Losurdo also explores in detail the extent to which Germany's Nazi ideology was explicitly modelled on the American pattern, and not least the influence of Henry Ford's infamous book The International Jew, 1920. "According to Himmler, along with the Protocols, Ford's book played a decisive .. role in the Fuhrer's formation, as well as his own. What is certain is that The International Jew continued to be published with great fanfare in the Third Reich,..." [p179] Losurdo agrees that there are valid and useful comparisons to be made between Nazism and Stalin’s USSR, and lists many, but he argues (with a huge amount of detailed evidence) that it is impossible to make sense of fascism or Nazism without placing it squarely in the context of Western colonialism and the most important comparison has to be between Hitler’s Germany and the USA. The idea initially seems absurd because it is unfamiliar, but the evidence presented is overwhelming.

I will concentrate from here on just one theme of the book, with long quotations. Losurdo refers to Hannah Arendt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_A... and her discussion of totalitarianism very early in his book (page 9) and again towards the conclusion (p304).

[p9ff] “On the one hand, Arendt subsumes Stalin’s USSR together with Hitler’s regime under the category of ‘totalitarianism’. On the other, she reconstructs the parabola leading to Auschwitz, starting like Lukacs with reactionary critics of Enlightenment and the French Revolution - Boulainvilliers, Burke and Gobineau. Her harsh assessment of the British Whig is especially significant: his view of liberty as a hereditarily transmitted privilege, and his rejection of the rights of man, were imbued with a sentiment of inequality that would later inspire the imperial metropolis in its relationship with the colonies. In this sense, the first great indictment of the French Revolution already contained the ‘seeds of racist ideology’. A direct line runs from Burke to Disraeli and the most virulent forms of imperialism, inherited by the Third Reich. Like Lukacs in the case of Social Darwinism, Arendt pointed the finger at ‘naturalistic conceptions’ which, starting with the liquidation of the idea of equality, were above all diffused in Britain and Germany. The country that experienced the ominous triumph of the Third Reich was one where Burke had enjoyed ‘considerable influence’. The ‘affinities between German and British racist ideologies’ were apparent. The country at the head of the anti-French coalitions [Britain] was obsessed by ‘theories of heredity and their modern equivalent, eugenics’. It was no accident if the hopes of the anti-democratic and racist Gobineau were initially focused on Britain and then, after 1871, on Germany.”

”...it was precisely in the colonies that the univers concentrationnaire made its first appearance (Arendt takes the example of Egypt under British domination), and large scale massacres and genocides were perpetrated (with the collapse of ‘the peaceful Congo population from 20 to 40 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1911’), anticipating the horrors of the twentieth century…”[p9, 10]

[p.304] “Nineteen fourteen was the beginning of what many historians characterise as the Second Thirty Years War…. During this crisis, independently of the Bolshevik Revolution and often prior to it, we witness the emergence of all those constitutive features of the totalitarian and concentration camp universe that historical revisionism … seek to deduce from the fateful October 1918.

“A merciless struggle required iron discipline on both sides; the regimentation of society reached unprecedented levels. … and this applies to countries with the oldest liberal traditions. In the USA, although safe on the other side of the Atlantic and sheltered from any danger of invasion, people could be sentenced to as much as twenty years in prison for having expressed an opinion liable to disturb the climate of sacred patriotic duty. Such patriotic duty was configured as a kind of single party: political, trade union or cultural organisations that challenged it were ruthlessly suppressed. A feature of the totalitarian phenomenon is the imposition of a strict state monopoly on information. This monopoly first appeared and proved brilliantly effective, in the North American Republic. Seven days after declaring war, Wilson established a Committee on Public Information that even regimented high culture. Another characteristic of the totalitarian regime is an admixture of control and violence by the state with control and violence from below, perpetrated by political organisations or militarized sections of civil society. During the First World War, a very prominent role was played by vigilante groups unearthing, attacking and terrorizing possible or potential ‘’traitors.’ Finally, according to Arendt, totalitarianism is not content to impose a passive consensus, but demands an active consensus and active participation in a unanimous national effort. ..The same slogans prevailed: ‘total mobilization’, ‘total war’, and even ‘total politics.’

“The iron fist targeted entire ethnic groups, suspected of maintaining links with the enemy...Hence resort to deportation. Among its victims were the Armenians, whom the Turkish government blamed for favouring collaboration with Christian and Czarist Russia, which in its turn deported Jews, who were suspected of looking to Wilhelmine and social democratic Germany as a possible liberator from the yoke of anti-semitism….

“Along with the practice of deportation, concentration camps emerged...in countries with the most stable liberal traditions. .. The univers concentrationnaire became a reality during the Second World War, when Roosevelt had American citizens of Japanese origin (including women and children) deported to concentration camps, even rounding them up from Latin America. In 1950, the McCarran Act was passed, setting up six concentration camps around the country to hold political prisoners.’ …

“The diffusion in the most diverse countries of institutions and features typical of totalitarianism clarifies a crucial point: rather than a particular ideology, its genesis is to be sought in war. We may venture a definition: totalitarianism is the political regime corresponding to total war… It goes without saying that this new political regime assumes very different forms depending on the respective geopolitical situations, political traditions and ideologies.” [pp 302-304]

This final phrase is all important to understanding Losurdo’s argument. He never seeks to evade or understate the moral failures and inhuman behaviours of any government or people identified in his account. For example, he is not an apologist for communist mass murders, for Japanese atrocities, for the inhumanity of the Jacobin Terror. Nor is he some type of moral relativist, in the sense that, by understanding context we may learn to forgive atrocious behaviours. He explicitly rules out such thinking. What he demands, though, is a fair and balanced assessment in every case:

”Comprehension of massive conflicts presupposes analysis of the interacting behaviour of the antagonists. The presumption on the part of one of the interested parties - the one that emerged victorious - to erect itself into judge of the other, condemning it on the basis of criteria to which it declines to submit, is ridiculous.” [p316]

With this in mind, he refers to comments of Hannah Arendt (in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism) regarding both the French and the Russian Revolutions.

“By contrast, the ideas of the theoretician of natural racial inequality met with little response in post-Revolutionary France, which was in the vanguard in achieving ‘political equality’ (it was ‘the only country’ not to discriminate against blacks). A positive judgement of the French revolution also seems to apply to Robespierre, who is approvingly cited several times for standing firm on the unity of the human race and for his hostility to colonial conquests…

“As opposed to the Anglo-German conservative and reactionary traditions, the positive term of the antithesis comprises the American and French revolutionary tradition. At this point in time, the two declarations of rights were equated and analysed conjointly. Hence condemnation of the totalitarian USSR did not as yet involve denunciation of 1789 and 1793. In fact, strictly speaking, it did not even involve condemnation of October 1917, given that, at this stage of her development, Arendt was concerned to distinguish between Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship and Stalin’s totalitarianism. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Russia presented itself as a society which, albeit within limits imposed by a dramatic state of emergency, had a richly articulated internal life. Whereas Czarism had harshly oppressed the various nationalities, Lenin, by contrast, strove to accommodate them to the maximum. There was broad support from ethnic groups, which were able to express themselves as autonomous cultural and national entities for the first time. They represented an antidote to the totalitarian regime, between the amorphous mass and the charismatic head stood a whole series of organisms that impeded and frustrated the latter’s immediate volition. In addition to various nationalities, this also applied to other forms of expression of social and political reality. For example, trade unions achieved an organisational autonomy unknown in Czarist Russia. The rich articulation of the society born of the revolution was completely dismantled by Stalin, who, in order to impose the totalitarian regime, had to artificially create an atomized, amorphous mass, which then became the object or base of the charismatic, unchallenged power of the infallible leader. Moreover, according to the Arendt of the early 1950s, the transition from one phase of soviet history to the next was punctuated not by the inexorable logic of Bolshevik ideology, but by the ‘outbreak of the civil war’. “[p10]

In that final phrase, again, lies the crux. For what has emerged since has been a wave of revisionist history seeking to call that insight into question and this reflects a line of descent from Burke. He points first to Robert Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions, which offers a contrast between Western revolutions, which occurred in the Eighteenth Century in advanced countries, and from which emerged “Western” and “Atlantic” civilization, with non Western revolutions, which occurred in the twentieth century in more backward countries. Palmer acknowledged that there were differences of scale and intensity between the revolutions of France and America, but they were not a priori deducible from ideology, and instead arose from the concrete situation in each case. [p12]

This left major difficulties which Hannah Arendt sought to remedy in her 1963 book on Revolutions. She thought an Atlantic civilization did indeed exist in the Eighteenth Century, but now proposed that this was ruined by the ‘disastrous course’ of the French Revolution - that is, the emergence of Jacobinism. ‘One is tempted to hope that the rift which occurred at the end of the eighteenth century is about to heal in the middle of the twentieth century, when it has become rather obvious that Western civilization has its last chance of survival in an Atlantic community.’ ….. On Revolution claimed that ‘freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out’ (in the wake of the French Revolution) or where it had been defeated.

”We have attended at some length to Arendt. An anti-fascist Jew exiled to the USA, she had looked with respect and sympathy on the USSR, which in 1942 she credited with having ‘patently eliminated anti-Semitism’ in the context of a just and very modern solution of the national question.’ Only via subsequent, laborious stages did she arrive at wholesale condemnation of the October Revolution and the French Revolution. Her's is an evolution that illuminates with especial clarity the radical mutation in the Zeitgeist, with the transition from the anti-fascist grand alliance to the outbreak of the Cold War and the consequent development of a ‘Western’ ideology commensurate with the new situation.” [pp 13 -15]

I have tried to capture a flavour of the arguments in this book. As I said earlier, the risk is that I have actually given a false impression. I realise that for many people the messages of this book are unwelcome and they will avoid reading it. For others, the book may seem too academic and dense. My own reaction was that the book is completely relevant and necessary to what is happening around me and if anything it is understated, not overstated. Apart from its major themes, the book gave me many fascinating insights into random topics. It pulled me short on some of my established opinions. For example, in a very brief comment on the history of China under Mao Zedong, it raised some quite unexpected ways to reinterpret his otherwise inexcusable regime. On the other hand, I was unwilling to accept a few of his typically frank assertions, not least some very negative remarks about Nietzsche which suggest that he encountered Nietzsche through Nazi writings and had not taken time out to correct his misunderstandings.

Altogether, the book was thought provoking, lively and absolutely essential reading to make sense of the ideological minefield that is history today. ...more

It got a little better at the end but most of this book was pretty dry despite having my political sympathy for the subject this book was in danger of getting three stars. The author writes on modern revisionism and the smack talking of revolutionary and left-wing movements of the 20th century. The example of Stalin and every other left wing bogey man is used as a bulwark for the neoliberal order and a discouragement to political action for the downtrodden. This is why I sympathize with the authIt got a little better at the end but most of this book was pretty dry despite having my political sympathy for the subject this book was in danger of getting three stars. The author writes on modern revisionism and the smack talking of revolutionary and left-wing movements of the 20th century. The example of Stalin and every other left wing bogey man is used as a bulwark for the neoliberal order and a discouragement to political action for the downtrodden. This is why I sympathize with the authors criticism of modern historians trashing of the old left.However he could have written this to a general audience which is looking to hear this message. This text was extremely dry and would have been made much better by becoming more accessible and less dry....more

although i understand why i feel he sometimes tries to get into the logic of the people he's criticising too intensely? like so that he doesn't look at alternative analysis or moral stuff... idk i can't explain. it's a book about a lot of heavy stuff and have a lot of thoughts and i want to do justice both to the book and the people who suffered the tragedies talked about and be careful about how things are talked about in the book